For IT organizations inundated with complaints about why their applications and infrastructure can't be as simple, intuitive and secure as email from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, some are pointing to Google's less-than-inspiring SLAs for hosted applications as evidence that a reprieve is in sight. Google's SLA terms do leave lots of wiggle room for the consumer giant such as:

Promising penalties for downtime based on user error rates exceeding 5% but using server error rates as the adjudicating measure.

Defining downtime as 10 minutes or more of contiguous interruption.

Making credits contingent upon the customer's timely notification of service interruption.

Excluding planned downtime from service interruption.

Offering three 9's of availability for unplanned downtime (almost 9 hours per year).

Unfortunately these facts do not serve as evidence that IT can drop its guard and not worry about the ensuing consumerization onslaught. If anything, these terms and conditions are becoming the rule, not the exception. It is more likely that these realities point to an unstoppable scenario unfolding that conditions users to trade less stringent terms and conditions for simplicity, transparency, choice and scalability.

Action Item: Storage organizations must tip the scales and rebalance their service portfolios by benchmarking not only other organizations, but also leading consumer storage delivery models. The outcome must be flexible storage service models with simpler packaging, more competitive pricing, greater transparency of consumption and user choice.